Graswald

The Best Way to add Vegetation in Blender

Graswald is a professional high-quality asset pack containing different species of weeds, grass, and moss as well as various kinds of debris, packed in a powerful add-on that allows incredible customization.

The Problem with Species-Driven Particle Systems

Plants grow in many different ways, depending on the amount of rain they get, the amount of sunlight, the temperature, their age, and other species that grow in the same place (plants AND animals). That way, you might find the same species of grass growing as a big tuft or mowed down in your lawn, looking completely different. Most asset packs though focus on species only, and therefore can't illustrate the full variety of vegetation.

To solve this, Graswald assets are organized by species, but for each species, you can use different particle systems, displaying different variants of the same species.

For example, if you want to add Ribwort Plantains to your scene, you can either add big plantains like you'd find in a meadow or the smaller variant that might grow in your lawn. You can also support them with the fitting plantain flowers, or some dead plantains, that are decaying below.

Get the Detail you need!

Every single asset was carefully modeled with reference to the structural details of the real plant. With Graswald, you'll get photorealgrass with visible nodes, sheaths, and collars or weed flowers with visible ligules and stigmata, allowing stunning detail that even holds up in close-up situations and micro shots.

There is no faster way to add your assets

Add ready-made Particle Systems to your scene with literally three clicks, or import the individual assets, which you can then place by hand for close-up situations.

Build complete Ecosystems

Graswald doesn't only provide green grass blades and a few weeds. Adding dead leaves, (dead) moss, sticks, pine needles and other scatter debris lets you build environments from the ground up that look photoreal and are highly customizable.

Unlimited Variations

Graswaldconsists of a total of 32different species of grass, weeds, moss, dead leaves and ground debris.

Chose between a total of 79 different particle systems consisting of up to 69 model variations per particle system.

You'll get a total of 663 different models, allowing an incredible amount of variation for your nature scenes.

PBR, PBR, PBR!

If you want to jump on the endlessPhysically Based Rendering train, you're good to go! All Graswald materials are using the brand new Principled BSDF shader, allowing a flexible workflow with physicallycorrect shading where you need it. This ensures that the assets will always look great in every lighting condition!

Artistic control is still important though, so if you want to have less intense reflections for whatever reasons, do not despair. Graswald's interface allows you to change all important settings, so you'll get full control of your Roughness, Specular, Bump and Translucency.

Make it your own!

With the assets comes a powerful system allowing you to customize and optimize your plants to any needs.

Change the density, scale, seed and display percentage right in the Graswald Menu.

Quickly paint and assign vertex groups for each particle system, or use existing groups as a base for new ones.

Change the maximum draw type for each system (Textured, Solid, Wire, Bounds)

Switch between different material qualities (High, Medium, Low)

Directly import the individual assets for further customization or hand placement for more detail

Customize the look of the assets switching between Basic and Advanced material settings

Besides the standardtechnical settings (Specular, Roughness, Translucency, Bump, Hue, Saturation, and Value) you can get even closer to real nature by altering the looks with more artistic settings.

Add dead patches to your grass and change their brightness and color, as well as their scale, spread, and intensity.

There's always some dead, dry grass, even in the finest lawns. Add dead grass blades with the dryness settings and use Graswald's sophisticated masking tools to achieve the exact look you aim for.

Speaking of lawns, add lawn stripes to your cut grass to add incredible patterns for a Big League Look.

Randomize all your assets with value and color randomization settings.

But here comes the big deal:

Age your plants for ultra-realism!

There's one thing that seems to always be missing in CG environments: Death.

A lot of nature renders seem off because they look unnaturallyhealthy and green. In the real world, though, this is not the case. Plants live in a constant struggle for space, water, and sunlight. Most of them die or have at least some dead parts, which you don't notice when you see it, but you DO notice if they're missing!

Graswald allows you to change the age of your plants, making it possible to have young fresh leaves for a lovely spring atmosphere or old, broken, yellow leaves to nail those winter scenes, adding that extra tiny bit of realism, to get your renders to the next level!

Use a sophisticated collection of masking sliders, to get exactly the results you want by altering the overall percentage, the intensity and the percentage of single leaves of an individual plant.

Optimized in every Way Possible!

Graswald assets come in three different material qualities: High, Medium and Low.

The High material quality is perfect for close-ups, featuring transparency and the highest texture resolution (up to 4k).

The Medium material quality works well for larger scenes, where the plants aren't the focus or where faster rendering is needed. No transparency and 512px large textures make this material optimal for people with no time or loads of expensive computers.

The Low material quality makes scattering huge areas much easier. With no transparency and a minimal texture size of 16px, you don't have to worry about investing in detail that won't be visible in the final result, thus resulting in very fast render times.

But thanks to the powerful Graswald interface, you can not only optimize the material, you can change the number of polygons yourself as well!

You can either add levels of subdivision for each particle system visible in the viewport and/or only render, or decimate them, just by tweaking the sliders in the Graswald menu!

Furthermore, all assets have been modeled with optimization in mind, meaning that each model only has the number of polygons that are needed to achieve photorealistic shapes and shading.

The same thoughts were considered with the transparency. Huge amounts of transparency are not only causing greater render times but can also cause weird artifacts. Graswald assets, however, are restricted to thelowest amount of transparency possible, leading to fasterrender times and lessmemory consumption.

Still not convinced? Then listen to these fine guys:

What Others Think:

"Graswald is a package with high-quality plants created with close attention to detail, plus an easy to use user interface for quick customization. I especially love the feature that you can change the age of the grass with a slider, so you can turn a green meadow into a dry grass field. I will have a lot of fun with this tool in future projects, totally recommended!"

Zacharias Reinhardt3D Artist & Certified Blender Trainer

"The amount of work, attention to detail and quality is a breath of fresh are straight from nature. The addon is clean and easy to use to get great looking, top-notch nature to fill out your scene. It's now going to be a part of my regular pipe-line"

Mason MenziesAsset Developer at Poliigon.com/Environment Artist

"Graswald does all the hard work for you, with insanely detailed models that don't blow the polygon budget, packed inside a clever plugin to automate all the boring parts. Certainly a great addition to every artist's toolbox."

"I was so amazed by the ridiculous amount of detail that went into these models! When there's something I have learned about nature assets, then that there can be never enough of them to match the beautiful variety of nature. Graswald does exactly that, offering the artist maximum flexibility with sophisticated distribution and shaders."

Lukas Walzer3D Artist at UP design studio Stuttgart

"Graswald is an amazing tool. It is highly customizable, offers an incredible level of details, stunning realism, and big variety. It allows you to create convincing environments without much effort."

Helmy ArdiansyahFreelance 3D Artist

"Graswald is quite possibly the best grass and shrubs pack for blender that I've ever seen. It's got a great selection of different plants, all of which look incredibly realistic and are very useful in almost any nature scene. The addon that comes with Graswald is also well designed and pleasant to work with."

Rico CilliersFreelance 3D Sculptor/Modeler/Texturer

"Graswald is a mind-blowing add-on. With Graswald, just a few clicks can land you an industry-grade nature render -- I don't think there is anything else out there that can do that."

Grant WilkHost of Remington Graphics & CGC Weekly

If you are still unsure, check out the quality of the assets and download the Graswald Freebies!

Learn everything you need to know to get started:

Zacharias Reinhardt explains some very useful tips and workflows here as well:

What is the difference between Graswald and the Graswald Asset Library?

Graswald is the full product, fully compatible with Blender. With Graswald, you'll get all the features showcased on the product page. The Graswald Asset Library includes the models (as fbx files) and textures (as png files) only. It is mainly for people, who don't use Blender and just want to buy the assets themselves. It comes without materials or any other customization possibilities, but you can set that up in your favorite 3D application. ForBlender users, we highly recommend buying the full Graswald.

Graswald is not yet compatible with Blender 2.8, but we will work on it when a beta version will be released!

Item Rating

This item has an average rating of 5 from 20 ratings by the community.

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DM3D
20 days ago

Well thought out resource, extremely realistic models. The interface is intuitive and helpful.

impachatos
about 2 months ago

Have only been using this for a few days, but I love it. Easy to start with, easy to use. A great product do use in many different ways and projects.
Keep up the good work!

elEleni
2 months ago

Wonderful!

thegreattank
2 months ago

Best nature addon by far.

John Joyce
3 months ago

Very good plugin, easy to use yet powerful. Great detail & Quality. Love it!

Kevin
5 months ago

bashes the grass essentials to the ground! really love it! but you should advertise the fact that you can add custom assess in it a bit. took me a while to find that out! either i have not figured it out or you cannot animate them similar to the grass essentials from blender guru. nevermind that and you have a top tier addon!

Victor
5 months ago

Best nature addon out there!

Dorian Borremans
5 months ago

really great , the fact that we get a modded version of a particle system only for gras is really really great ,i just wish we could add our own herbs to the already existing graswald library

Julius Harling5 months ago

You can easily do so, as Kareem explained in his tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NXxGhR_tvI

1electronik
5 months ago

buen add-on, muy satisfecho gracias

varkenvarken
6 months ago

love it, would have given it 4.5 stars if possible.

There are some improvements possible though: personally I prefer a reference manual and although the videos are informative I don't want to watch a complete video to search for something specific. There are also some (very small) bugs: the orchard grass preview tile is not showing and if i disable a particle system from being visible in the particle settings this doesn't reflect in the Grasswald panel in the toolbar. (this might not count as a bug because I think this is pretty insolvable as the Python API does not provide an option to add listeners to existing properties).

When comparing Graswald to competitive products, things to notice are the *very* good quality particles in several levels of detail, a serious but still decent price and having it as an add-on (i.e. as an integral part of the UI rather than having to link external particle systems) really adds to the experience. The choice of species, especially with multiple variants, is also good, although I would love to see a stony debris option (I really liked the ground elder option though, because now I can model by complete back lawn with only one particle system ;-)

Anyway, good stuff!

Julius Harling5 months ago

Reference manual will be shipped with the next version, thanks for the advice!

originalnewbee
6 months ago

This is clearly one of the best addons I've seen. There are points of improvement in UI-clarity. Also some more tuning parameters is needed in Distribution and other things to get the best out of blender, So, only four stars from me. But still, great value!

Julius Harling6 months ago

Hey, thanks for the kind words. What exactly do you think could be improved?

bobnolin
6 months ago

Great product, but it could use better documentation (either written or a better video). How do updates work? Via email?

Julius Harling6 months ago

More videos are on their way! What exactly would you like to know more about/ isn’t covered enough in the already existing videos?
Minor updates will be announced in ththe graswald release thread on blenderartists (https://blenderartists.org/t/graswald-release/1115751/52), and major ones via email!
Kind regards
Julius

Vlado Akmacic
6 months ago

I like the addon

lombardo thibault
6 months ago

Simply Perfect !!! big thanks from France !
it would be great if in the future you sell new species ;)

rhino
6 months ago

It seems that the Dandelion-bug still exists (downloaded a couple of hours ago, however version-number is still 1.0).

I like the addon very much but the missing manual (unfortunately a common 'feature' in the Blender-scene) eventually leads to a four star rating only. If I hadn't seen Zacharias' tutorial vid before I would have missed many things and some very useful hints.

Julius Harling6 months ago

I agree about the lack of documentation, we are planning to add more videos to our Youtube Channel and right as I am writing this, there is a new video being uploaded about creating custom packages. We decided, that we want to release the pack now and not wait until all of the documentation was done, as this would have taken us (and you) months to wait. Be certain though, that there will be much more tutorials for you guys to enjoy, soon.
The dandelion error should be fixed, just in case I uploaded the wrong zip, I renamed the right file and it is currently uploading again, try it in a few hours to see if it works now!

canek
6 months ago

Excellent quality! I only wish it included some ground materials (or did I miss them?)

Andreas Leiner
6 months ago

Have the same problem. Big dandelion dont render. But love it anyway. Its easy to use and gives good results.

Julius Harling6 months ago

Fixed it, please redownload! (And thank you buy the way :D )

guitartom47
6 months ago

Love it so far...Am having a problem with Dandelion-Big not showing in render, though. Has anyone else noticed this?

Julius Harling6 months ago

I just fixed the issue, now everything should work :D

troy
6 months ago

Love It.... !

Michael Vanecek
6 months ago

Solid package so far. A good start with common plants, mosses, and grasses - even dandelion flowers and puffballs. I love the detail in the leaves and the choices we have on aging and ease of customization.